This Is So On: Andrew Ross Sorkin vs. Paul Krugman

Terrible intra-Times tiff: Nobel Prize-winning op-ed columnist Paul Krugman has publicly called out Too Big to Fail author (and business-desk boy wonder) Andrew Ross Sorkin. Yesterday, Sorkin wrote on the paper’s Dealbook blog, “You may recall that during the most perilous months of 2008 and early 2009, there was a vigorous debate about how the government should fix the financial system. Some economists, including Nouriel Roubini of New York University and The Times’s own Paul Krugman, declared that we should follow the example of the Swedes by nationalizing the entire banking system. They argued that Wall Street was occupied by the walking dead, and that no matter how much money we threw at the banks, they would eventually topple the system all over again and cause a domino effect worldwide.”

Krugman responded today in his very serious blog for very serious people, the Conscience of a Liberal.In a post titled “Andrew Ross Sorkin Owes Several People an Apology,” Krugman claims that he never said any of these things, at least not completely, and either did Nouriel Roubini. Krugman says he never called for a nationalization of all the banks, and also asserts that Sorkin is misrepresenting the extent of Krugman’s defeatism. “The argument was never that ‘no matter how much money we threw at the banks, they would eventually topple the system all over again.’ Again, where did I say that? The argument was always that if we were going to rescue the banks—and we were—taxpayers should get the potential upside as well as the potential downside,” he writes. Krugman goes on to accuse Sorkin of “caricaturing [his] position, making it sound far more extreme than it actually was.” This, he concludes, “is definitely not OK.”